A Sterling Refutation

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So let me get this straight.  The 80 year old owner of a basketball team – a guy who was set to receive a second lifetime achievement award from the NAACP, with a half-black, half-Mexican floozy girlfriend who was lavished with two million bucks worth of goodies by Sterling, who is being sued by Sterling’s wife, who set him up with leading questions in an illegally recorded private conversation designed to induce the very embarrassing answers he wound up providing –  is being drawn and quartered in public for being a Cliven Bundy-style Klansman/Nazi and run out of the NBA for life.

This is just the latest example of media-driven public opinion serving as judge, jury and executioner.  If, as in the case of Bundy, this was based on unambiguous evidence of a person’s racism, that is one thing.  But what if the rush to judgment is based on an inaccurate depiction of what was actually said on the smoking gun recording?

The question of whether Sterling’s actions over time convict him as a racist depends on conflicting evidence.  He at one time has a far better record in hiring minority coaches and executives than most NBA owners, and as one of LA’s largest landlords, has been sued multiple times for residential discrimination against blacks and Latinos. He may well be typical of the human condition, in which one’s assets and liabilities are best separated by the word “and” rather than “but.”

Here’s a stunning thought: perhaps he likes some black people and not others.

But one way or the other, this whole affair doesn’t prove he is a racist.  If you actually listen not only to what he said, but his explanation of why he said it, you may well come away with a rather different understanding. I sure did.

The girlfriend in question, V. Stiviano (she apparently has renounced or forgotten her actual first name), has been accused in a $1.8 million lawsuit by Sterling’s wife of engaging “in conduct designed to target, befriend, seduce, and then entice, cajole, borrow from, cheat and/or receive as gifts transfers of wealth from wealthy older men whom she targets for such purposes.”

So let’s have a go at the payback conversation which will live in infamy (I’m surprised Sterling didn’t pull a Marion Barry “b—- set me up”).  Stiviano obviously baited Sterling into sounding as bad as he could, but the problem is that Sterling did not actually say anything racist.  He never used the n-word or anything close to it.  He never actually even demeaned black people.  What he did was to presume that others are racist, or sufficiently racially prejudiced that he didn’t want his girlfriend to bring blacks to Clippers games, or post photos of herself with them on social media websites.  Sterling’s beliefs about what others will think upon seeing his girlfriend with black people may be foolish, misguided or crazy, but they don’t make him a racist.

If anyone would bother to listen carefully to the recording, this is plain to hear.  They were talking about someone else who commented to Sterling about her photos.  Talking about race.  Sterling says he knows she thinks he is a racist.  She says she doesn’t think he’s a racist but that he is surrounded by bad people.  Sterling says “We live in a culture.  We have to live within that culture.” He clearly believes that others’ racism will cause a problem for him if she is publicly associated with blacks.  That might well make him a moral coward, but not a racist.  It also doesn’t say much for those whose judgment he fears – judgement about the race of people his mistress appears with in his seats at games and on social media.

For his transgressions, Sterling has been effectively banned for all time from his team and fined $2.5 million.  For his half billion dollar investment, he can’t go near the property he purchased, and may very well have to sell it.

I guess this is what “post-racial” America looks like.  One crazy old philandering coot who spent a lot of his own money to enjoy himself on the playground of life says a couple of things in private that are offensive and a lynch mob is unleashed.  Even the president, in the midst of a foreign trip, felt the need to express his outrage.

Here are five questions which seem obvious but have gone mostly unasked in the midst of the firestorm that took over the news cycle for days on end:

1) If the guy is really a racist, how come he’s got a half-black girlfriend?  I mean, having a black girlfriend reveals a bit more about someone’s, uh, true feelings than hiring a black plumber or accountant, doesn’t it?  Is saying someone is a racist while having a black girlfriend like saying America is still a racist nation when we elect a black man to the most powerful position in the world? (oh wait, apparently we in fact are still a racist nation)

2) How many of us could measure up to the scrutiny of our private conversations being aired in public?  How many of the high and mighty critics casting stones from their pedestals are without sin that is as bad or worse?

3) Why did that paragon of racial harmony, the NAACP, honor Sterling with a lifetime achievement award in 2009 at the same time he was being sued for racial and age-based discrimination by the dismissed former GM of the Clippers, Elgin Baylor?  And before you say it is because of big contributions, the record shows that Sterling has only ponied up $5000 to the NAACP.  They of course have now rescinded the second lifetime achievement award they planned to give Sterling next month – and just how perfect is it that one of the most public racists in American history, Al Sharpton, will receive their “person of the year” award the very night Sterling was supposed to get his award.  What a long, strange trip this has been for the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

4) How come the thought police have unleashed the dogs and hoses on the owner of a basketball team while ignoring the unbelievable comments of someone who actually matters, the Governor of Illinois, comparing black Republicans to Jewish Nazis?  This, of course, is just one of many examples of selective outrage.

5) Won’t the market, as always, dish out its own organic response to this turn of events in the form of fleeing sponsors, less good players wanting to sign with the Clippers, less minority fans going to the games, less money for TV rights, etc?  But let’s not allow that.  In a world increasingly dominated by anonymous and cowardly know-nothings weighing in with idiotic comments on the internet and bombarding us with the cheapest commodity on earth, opinions – they cost nothing and everyone has one – why let people quietly consider the actual facts and determine their own response to this whole affair when that can be bypassed with a public spectacle marked by the faux outrage of a rogue’s gallery of falsely pious hypocrites, front runners, bandwagon jumpers and reflexively PC sportswriters desperate for the credibility they crave but never receive because they spend their lives covering fun and games (and I’m allowed to say that because I was a sports broadcaster for several years).

Even if we stipulate that Sterling is a racist, there is a big difference between a racist nation, and a nation that contains racists.  All societies – and sports leagues – contain racists of every color.  It is a condition of the heart, and part and parcel of the human condition.

As is so often the case, this story is less about what was done or said, and more about the reaction to it.  And especially considering the enormous, palpable and undeniable gains we have made in the equal treatment of all our citizens, the public execution of Donald Sterling tells a sad tale about where we are as a nation.

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